Hungary

We organized Drupal Conference Hungary 2007 for this past weekend. After last fall's first local conference, this was our second big event in Hungary. The conference had more then 150 registrants, so we needed to close the registration in advance to let people have seats in the session room. Unfortunately this year we were not so close to the 90% show up percentage we had last year, so the room was not fully packed. However, this was the only negative point I was able to spot.

Those who have been there, enjoyed sessions about the Drupal 6 improvements (presented by myself), debugging Drupal code with Károly Négyesi (the infamous chx), setting up a news site with core modules and improving the experience with Views, Panels and friends (with István Palócz). Kristof van Tomme presented our single English session about a small business (brochure) site use case and he promoted the Szeged user group as well as plans to organize an international DrupalCon in 2008 in Hungary. Áron Novák presented his FeedAPI project developed under Google Summer of Code sponsorship, while Gergő Lippai and ninja shared performance tips for Drupal sites, from the perspective of criticalmass.hu, the biking event website, which needs to work under extreme high loads around the events. János Fehér presented the theme improvements in Drupal 6, and our last slot was reserved for lightning talks. Márk Tolmács stepped up to present about running Drupal above a JBoss Java application server and the Caucho Quercus engine. This was a pleasant surprise for all of us, as he showed up with his suggestion an hour before the slot started. István and I also shared some module tips with the attendees, before the closing remarks.

All-in all it was a very good event, and I hope we balanced breaks with sessions properly, giving time to discuss Drupal issues and to connect with people (see some more photos by clicking on the photo above). I know I answered lots of questions in between sessions and made some people smile with the tools I presented in my sessions.

We as organizers are most grateful for our sponsors, who made it possible to organize this event. The Drupal Association was our gold sponsor, and some local companies and communities, as well as a few individual sponsors helped the event happen. Thank you all for making this conference possible!